Recently, portable terminals have become necessary articles used by people of all ages. and service providers and terminal manufacturers are competing in developing products (or services) to differentiate from other enterprises.
For example, portable terminals have evolved into multimedia devices to provide various functions and services such as phone book functions, game functions, Short Message Service (SMS), Electronic (e)-mail services, morning call functions, Motion Picture Expert Group Audio Layer-3 (MP3) functions, scheduling functions, digital camera functions, wireless Internet services, and so forth.
Also, the portable terminals provide a navigation function for receiving satellite signals and connecting to traffic information centers through mobile communication networks to provide traffic information or route information to users.
The navigation function notifies a moving route to a user of the portable terminal, but cannot provide route point information of the user of the portable terminal.
Also, because the navigation function cannot share the route information with a user of another portable terminal, a user of a portable terminal without a navigation function cannot detect the moving route.
That is, a user of a portable terminal without a navigation function may have a schedule with another user but may not know a route to the destination. If the route information can be shared with the user, the user can easily visit the destination by using the shared route information. However, if the sharing of the route information is impossible, the user is inconvenienced by having to continuously communicate with the other user to visit the destination.
What is therefore required is an apparatus and method for a portable terminal that can overcome the above problems.